Japanese imperial couple charms Stanford on brief campus visit

STANFORD -- Demonstrating their soft-spoken friendliness and their senses
of humor and history, the emperor and empress of Japan stopped by Stanford
for a two-and-a-half hour visit Thursday, June 23, with university faculty,
staff, students, alumni and trustees.

The campus visit, on the 14th day of the imperial couple's 15- day U.S.
tour, was the only university stop. It highlighted Stanford's longstanding
connections with Japan, including honors given to its first president, David
Starr Jordan, by two previous emperors. (See related story.)

The visit featured a tour of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where
Japanese physicists are part of an international collaboration, and a
luncheon at Lou Henry Hoover House hosted by University President Gerhard
Casper; his wife, Dr. Regina Casper, former Secretary of State George Shultz
and his wife, O'Bie Shultz.

An informal garden reception with 14 university students who have studied
various aspects of Japanese culture, history and technology concluded the
visit. The imperial couple, whose role is largely ceremonial, did not make
formal remarks.

Throughout the visit, however, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko asked
numerous questions and received answers in English with only rare assistance
from interpreters, those who met them said. Their hushed personal
conversations, out of earshot of news media observers, covered subjects
ranging from high-energy physics to Japanese literature and medieval religion
to personal recollections of Japanese American internment camps.

The empress particularly charmed students by ignoring efforts to hurry her
along as she discussed their studies with each in the garden of Hoover House.
Several dozen members of the Japanese and American news media, kept back
several yards by Secret Service agents, watched.

"I expected her to be a frail little flower, but she was very interactive
and took charge" of the conversation, said Matthew Fraleigh, a June graduate
who is heading to a small Japanese town to teach English to adolescents. He
discussed his senior thesis on Mishima Yukio, a 20th- century Japanese
novelist, with the empress.

The students were thrown a curve at the last minute, however, when a
member of the royal entourage asked them to speak in Japanese to the couple
just minutes before the emperor and empress emerged from Hoover House to
mingle. Previously, the students had been advised against speaking Japanese
because etiquette calls for using kiego, a very polite form of the language
with formal verb endings and honorific noun prefixes that the students have
little chance to practice.

As the emperor and empress moved individually through a line of students,
occasional nervous laughter erupted when George Shultz prodded the students
to speak in Japanese. Most said they were too nervous to try.

"The empress spoke to me in Japanese, and I don't think I responded
quickly enough, so she translated into English," Fraleigh said.

SLAC tour

The visit began at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's visitors'
center around 11:45 a.m. Members of the American media, consular officials,
Secret Service agents and SLAC staffers wearing badges that said "Japan-USA
Cooperation at SLAC" assembled early to await the arrival of the imperial
couple's entourage, which included members of the Japanese press corps. A
staff member from the Japanese consulate in San Francisco explained that the
SLAC visit was scheduled to highlight that Japan is part of a 40-country
consortium working on high- energy physics at SLAC. (See related story on
collaborations.)

Among those who assembled at the entrance to SLAC to catch a glimpse of
the royal couple in their limousine were SLAC employees and a group of
Japanese children who are in San Jose for the summer studying English. Many
carried welcome signs in Japanese.

The entourage included Kiichi Miyazawa, former prime minister of Japan;
Takakazu Kuriyama, Japanese ambassador to the United States; and Ryozo Kato,
Japan's consul general in San Francisco, who was instrumental in arranging
the Stanford visit.

The emperor, dressed in a gray suit, and the empress, dressed in a pale
mint-green dress and hat, waved to the well-wishers as they arrived and later
asked a number of technical questions at the visitors' center, according to
SLAC Director Burton Richter and Hirotaka Sugawara, director of Japan's
National Laboratory for High-Energy Physics. The couple then was whisked off
to the collider center, where the emperor and empress were scheduled to visit
the seven-story-deep "pit" that holds the massive hardware for SLAC's atom
smasher.

The pit descent was suddenly canceled, however, shortly after a physicist
acting as elevator operator stepped out of the elevator to warn the media of
the imperial couple's pending arrival. The elevator's doors shut behind him
with the keys inside, prompting SLAC officials to race up stairwells to
deliver gifts to the couple at ground level. The slight change in plans may
have been a blessing in disguise, some planners of the royal visit said
later, because it allowed the entourage to get back on an extremely tight
schedule.

A mixed group of well-wishers and protesters - a crowd of about 150
according to police estimates - were visible to the imperial motorcade as it
passed the intersection of Mayfield Avenue and Santa Ynez Street on its way
to Hoover House. Some well-wishers carried signs of welcome while some
protesters, organized by Chinese and Korean student organizations at
Stanford, carried signs in several languages that were designed, organizers
said, to call attention to what they feel are inaccurate portrayals in
Japanese textbooks of the country's Asian occupations during World War II.

"We protested because we don't want the Japanese government to get a seat
on the United Nations Security Council. We say Japan is not eligible because
they still don't admit their [wartime] mistakes. It's different from
Germany," said Shuanglin Zhang, a postdoctoral student in neurology who
helped organize the demonstration. Students who participated, he said,
included Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and Americans.

The protesters and well-wishers, with police present, did not get in any
confrontations or attempt to block traffic, according to Sgt. John McMullen
of the Stanford Police Department.

Lively luncheon discussions

At Hoover House, the imperial couple mingled with guests and took an
interest in an exhibit of Stanford connections to Japan that was organized by
Anne Van Camp, Hoover Institution archivist. The guest list included Stanford
Nobel laureates and prominent alumni and trustees, including David Packard
and William Hewlett, co-founders of the Hewlett- Packard Co.; John
Freidenrich, chairman of the Stanford Board of Trustees; and Peter Bing, a
former chair and current member of the board. Michael Armacost, former U.S.
ambassador to Japan and now a visiting scholar at the Institute for
International Studies, also attended.

The exhibit included certificates presented by Japanese emperors to former
Stanford President Jordan in 1911 and 1922, the latter of which was signed by
Emperor Taisho and then-Crown Prince Hirohito, the current emperor's father.
The royal couple also took note of reports that Herbert Hoover had prepared
in 1946, at the request of President Truman, on the food situation in Japan,
Van Camp said.

Emperor Akihito signed the Hoover Institution's guest book on a campus
visit in 1967 when he was crown prince, she said, and signed at least two
guest books on this visit. In 1967, he made a quick trip to the Hoover
Tower's observation platform, she said, and met with then- Stanford President
Wallace Sterling. Akihito, trained in ichthyology, also told her that a
biology professor had shown him some of the fish specimens in Stanford's
collection on his previous visit.

In his luncheon welcoming remarks, Casper stressed the long history of
Stanford connections with Japan and called to the attention of guests a small
maple tree placed on the luncheon table that was grown by Stanford Professor
Tom Rohlen from a seed he collected from the grounds of the Katsura Imperial
Villa when Casper and Rohlen toured the grounds last November.

"For me this small tree symbolizes the fact that the relationship between
Japan and Stanford, while already more than 100 years old and flourishing,
always brings forward new seeds and new growth," Casper said.

He added that Stanford is "in the process of developing a highly selective
graduate program at Stanford for students with leadership qualities from
Japan, China and other Asian Pacific Rim countries."

Luncheon conversations were so lively that the dessert of lemon chiffon
mousse topped with raspberries in a chocolate tulip had to be skipped, said
Professor Daniel Okimoto, who helped plan the imperial visit. With just 50
minutes for four courses, he said, the guests elected to talk faster than
they chewed.

Okimoto said that Empress Michiko asked him a series of questions about
his family background that led him to tell her he was born in a makeshift
hospital in a stable of the Santa Anita Racetrack, when it was a Japanese
American relocation camp in World War II.

"She said there were other people born in stables who went on to make a
significant contribution to mankind," Okimoto said. "She has a good sense of
humor; I was impressed with her quickness afoot."

In general, Okimoto said, the Stanford hosts and American guests who met
the royal couple were "impressed with their capacity to convey the sense that
they were focused completely on you and able to block out everything else as
they spoke to you and shook your hand."

Trip's purpose and logistics

Initially, the royal couple had planned to bypass the San Francisco Bay
Area on their U.S. visit, Okimoto said, but Stanford became involved as a
host largely through efforts of Consul General Kato, who is a longtime friend
of Okimoto's.

"The idea of visiting SLAC came up because this was a cooperative area of
research on the cutting edge of science," Okimoto said. The goals, he said,
included highlighting areas of cooperation that Japan has with the United
States and "presenting Stanford as a global institution for learning. It was
symbolically an important visit for them."

The U.S. visit in general, he said, was an opportunity for the Japanese
media to show the royal couple "mingling and talking with Americans from all
walks of life in different settings."

"The Japanese public has an impression of the United States as a
dangerous, violent society, and it's not surprising to understand why the
public has come to hold this perception," said Okimoto, a political
scientist. "They read statistics about growth in robberies, murders, rapes
and so forth, and they have had firsthand, extensive coverage of crime
involving Japanese visitors to America."

Stanford is well known as one of the leading American universities in
Japan, he added, but even visiting scholars here have told him that they were
pleasantly surprised to find they could move about the country with little
fear of violence. "The emperor and empress went a lot of places and saw a lot
of things that provided snapshots of everyday life here."

Logistical planning for the visit, however, was anything but everyday. It
involved two months of preparation by a small core of Stanford staff members
as well as by members of the Japanese consulate, U.S. Secret Service and
campus police, according to Elizabeth Nichols of the Institute for
International Studies, one of the key planners.

There were five practice runs to steadily refine the itinerary, mostly to
cut minutes off a tight schedule. Even Trilla, the Caspers' cat, became a
subject of planning when it was realized she might take offense at the
snooping of a Secret Service dog assigned to sweeps of all locations prior to
the royal couple's arrival, said Lois Wagner of Events and Services.

On the day of the visit, those involved in making it work smoothly
included about 45 staff and physicists at SLAC and approximately 40 people on
campus in addition to Public Safety personnel. Staff from a variety of
departments "helped out at some point during the day, whether it involved
set-up, riding press buses to give directions, checking in lunch guests, or
just minding credential checkpoints and box lunch distribution," Nichols
said.

The event was less intensive for most Stanford personnel than planning for
Mikhail Gorbachev's 1990 visit, some of those involved with planning both
visits said. The exception, however, may be Public Safety and News Service
personnel, Nichols said, "who were really sandwiched" between the imperial
visit and the World Cup. "There are certain staff," she said, "who are really
looking tired."

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